New School Masking Study: Why do they bother?

The news is awash today with a new study suggesting that schools with mask mandates have a 3.5x higher rate of "Covid outbreaks" than those with no such requirements. For example: Newsweek and USNews.

At this point it's pretty unclear why researchers are even willing to put their names on studies like this. I can think of a couple explanations:

It's just a way of getting in front of more academic readers to burnish their credentials, or
They believe that masks "should" work, so they want to encourage people by whatever means necessary to wear them in as many situations as possible.

The study at hand is superficially compelling. A 350% increase in outbreaks is very significant, and that's such a large number that it's pretty unlikely to happen as a result of pieces of bad data or P Hacking. When I read the popular news reports on it, I wondered whether I'd have to change my stance that the data on school masking is very shaky.

Here are some sample responses I saw on Twitter this morning to the study:

"In other news, circles are round"
"Wait are you telling me wearing seatbelts have a higher chance of keeping you alive than playing on the freeway?"
Etc.

As usual, though, the devil is in the details, so I resolved to take a look at the study itself first.

I'm open to the idea that masks work. It certainly makes sense in a "common sense" sort of way. Given that, the study I've been hoping to see would go something like this:

In 100 fifth grade classrooms, 50 with mask mandates and 50 without, where vaccination rates were approximately equal, researchers studied the question of whether a student testing positive for the virus tended to infect students sitting adjacent to the infected student across then following 14 days. Researchers found that transmission was far higher among the unmasked, with adjacent students testing positive 10 percent of the time, while in masked settings the proportion was only 0.5 percent.

A study like that would be unambiguous and clear. The mode of transmission would not be in question. The evidence would follow the logic, and I would absolutely agree that masking students in school makes sense.

Unfortunately, this Arizona study is basically the exact opposite. It has such major flaws that it's just silly to derive any real conclusions from it. Here are several major issues:

An outbreak is defined as "two or more laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases among students or staff members ... within a 14-day period and at least 7 calendar days after school started." That definition is absurd. For starters, you have the obvious confounder that, just by chance, two students test positive during that incredibly broad timespan. Obviously the real question is whether the size of the outbreak scales somehow with the mask status of the students. And, were the two or more people in any sort of contact with each other? Most of the relevant schools had more than 1,000 students. Where's the causality here? How do we know that masks were relevant at all?
More nefariously, readers need to understand that the absence of the data suggested above isn't an "accident." If the researchers had data suggesting that larger outbreaks correlated with unmasked students, they would have published it, because it would have supported their thesis. This means no such data exists. I'm not worried about the risk of one staff member testing positive 10 days after a student tested positive. I'm worried about the obvious thing here: a kid in my kid's class tested positive, and later five other kids in the same class tested positive. So, did that happen? The study is silent on that point, which means, "no."
Unfortunately, this study has even broader P-hacking issues. Instead of the obvious split between "masked" and "non-masked" schools, the authors created three categories: "no mask mandate," "early mask mandate" and "late mask mandate," where "early" is defined as requiring masks from day 1 and "late" means they started a median 15 days into the school year. Now, this is important because, while the study lasted for six weeks, only the schools with "early" masking show a significant deviation of "outbreaks" from the no-mask schools. Somehow, beginning masking on day 15 doesn't do much at all to stem Covid outbreaks! Does that make any sense? Of course not, because this is classic P-hacking. The researchers noticed that if you combined the "early" and "late" mask cohorts into a single "mask" group, they didn't get the results they wanted. So they arbitrarily split the data in this way to make it seem more compelling.
This all leads to the fundamental flaw of not sufficiently considering alternative explanations for the incredibly weak data they've offered. It makes logical sense to me that "early" mask schools have much higher vaccination rates. People who are more scared of the virus, it seems to me, will vaccinate more and mask more. Unfortunately, the study's authors say vaccination data is "not available." Which makes you wonder, was it really not available? Or did they just not want to report it because it demolishes their desired result here?

So there you have it. Just a silly study that demonstrates basically nothing about mask wearing in schools.

The Cancel Blog's position on this topic is clear. We are not anti-science. We believe mRNA vaccines have been conclusively demonstrated to work and be safe. However, the data on masking is inconclusive, and masking probably doesn't work. What we'd love to know is why masking doesn't work, since it seems so logical that it would. Our working theory is that since, as the CDC says, something like 50 percent of viral particles can penetrate surgical and cloth masks, and since viruses multiply exponentially when they enter a person's body, masks just don't work well against viruses. This is in contrast to larger objects like bacteria, where there does seem to be a strong effect.

By the way, we just wanted to point out that according to progressives, even by writing this blog post, we're "killing people™️". Thank goodness we're writing this on the Cancel Blog, which has already been canceled, so they can just ignore us and get on with their days.

If you'd like to submit an idea or reaction, we're at thecancelblog@gmail.com